Official: City of Quincy emails hacked

Wednesday

QUINCY — People receiving weird emails from @quincyma.gov addresses may be the victims of a hacking scheme that attacked Quincy City Hall a few weeks ago.

Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the mayor's office, said the city's emails were hacked and used for an online phishing scam. Those who received unsolicited emails from the city with attachments should not open the attachments or emails and delete them from their inbox.

Walker said the city was hit by either the Emotet or TrickBot virus, both of which spread by sending out emails with infected attachments. "Basically every city department was impacted," Walker said.

Between Wednesday, Nov. 21 and Sunday, Nov. 25, the information technology department shut down all city servers and computers to clear out the virus. Emails and the city website were down for the holiday weekend.

"Members of our IT department physically went building to building to make sure everything was cleaned up in those five days," Walker said. "It should be wrapping up now."

Walker said it is possible that there is a lag time in killing the virus and that a few emails could still be going out, but the problem has been solved.

Email phishing is method of cyber attacking that is occurring more frequently. In a phishing scheme, hackers send emails that appear to be from legitimate sources and include a link or attachment that usually asks for things such as credit card numbers, account numbers, passwords and usernames.

In this instance, the email attachments looked like invoices, Walker said.